FPGALover

Xilinx vs. Altera: Which Is the Real Growth Stock?

Your investment decision should be made based on your time horizon. The challenge with the PLD business is that it takes 5 years from the time a decision is made to build a new chip and the time revenue ramps up. At least two years to introduce the new chip and another 3 years for customers to accept the new technology, build it into their complex systems (that thus require PLDs), qualify those systems, and sell them to their end customers. With this in mind, what we're seeing today is the impact on revenue of their 90-nm lines where Xilinx screwed up handsomely with Virtex-4. 65-nm was introduced in 2006 where Xilinx, for a full year, reaped up design wins with no real competition. It was Altera's time to screw up with Stratix III. Which means that sometime in 2009 the revenue trend should reverse. To reverse once more two years later when 40-nm technology ramps up into volume production, where Altera probably has an edge, thanks to TSMC... Nothing rocket science here.

But keep in mind that in the long term, the market cap of these companies tend to trade in a somewhat narrow channel...

Altera and Xilinx Report: The Battle Continues

Very lucid analysis. I believe Mr. Gavrielov has studied Geoff Moore who shows that becoming the platform upon which other people depend for their living is the right strategy in mature markets (and few people will argue that PLDs have become a mature market). Cisco's Chambers also subscribes to this view.

I'm a little worried that Altera's primary competitive advantage is owned by someone else (TSMC). What would prevent Xilinx from also doing business witht them? And I somewhat disagree with the author's comment that Altera's strategy is "to create the most advanced FPGAs". Stratix IV is essentially the same architecture as Stratix III...

Finally, one has to ask what the relevance of HardCopy really is. It is very R&D intensive software-wise. And still far from amounting to the 10% of revenue Mr. Daane has promised for years...